It's done: Civil War football game moves to Thursday

Ross William Hamilton/The OregonianOregon's LeGarrette Blount runs against the Beavers during last season's Civil War game in Corvallis. Next season's game, in Eugene, will be played on a Thursday night.

Change your calendars, football fans: The 2009 Civil War will kick off on a Thursday night, a UO spokesman confirmed. The game is being moved to lock in a TV broadcast deal with ESPN.

The Civil War, which will be in Eugene, will be ESPN's featured game on one of the network's highest-rated nights. Four games on a Saturday afternoon last September on ABC pulled a combined 3.6 million households.

Oregon State's Thursday game against USC two days earlier on ESPN reached nearly 5 million households nationwide.

UO and OSU officials agreed to move the game from Nov.28, when it would have conflicted with several other conference matchups attractive to TV executives. Oregon and Oregon State's athletic departments will get roughly $350,000 apiece in the deal, Pac-10 associate commissioner Duane Lindberg said.

"Pat Kilkenny was very aggressive in terms of getting those things up front and helping his budget out for next year," Lindberg said.

In addition to the financial benefits, the move also will give Oregon nearly two weeks off and Oregon State nearly three weeks off before they face each other.

Yet not everyone will embrace the schedule change. UO faculty have criticized the idea of having a game the week before final exams, where it will now fall, and on a weeknight.

While some fans praised the schools on Internet message boards for grabbing the national spotlight, many others decried the move as a money grab or complained of having their annual, all-day ritual truncated by having to work on Thursdays.

"When it comes to these Thursday night games, they are not easy, and we don't have a lot of our institutions in our league that are doing these," Lindberg said. "But they are a wonderful vehicle for exposure. ... Obviously, Pat felt that the benefits outweighed the downsides that come into play."

The last time Oregon played a football game on Thursday at home was against Arizona to start the 1997 season.

Oregon State played three Thursday night games last season, including a home game against USC, but all were in the first half of the season when there are fewer academic conflicts. Oregon State officials, including president Ed Ray, had to agree to the Civil War schedule change to make it work.

Kilkenny, a millionaire businessman who took over nearly two years ago as Oregon's athletic director, was hired largely to secure support from Phil Knight for Oregon's $200million basketball arena project. Kilkenny did that, helping land a $100million pledge from the UO alumnus and Nike co-founder. But Kilkenny also has shaken up things.

He reinstated baseball at Oregon after a nearly three-decade hiatus. He dropped the wrestling program and added a women's team not recognized as a sport by the NCAA: competitive cheer -- what Oregon now calls "team stunts and gymnastics."

Though sometimes uncomfortable speaking publicly, Kilkenny championed the arena project as it traveled a controversial journey through the State Board of Higher Education and Oregon Legislature. Both bodies approved the project, which is in the first stages of construction for an early 2011 opening.

Moving the Civil War will help both schools' bottom lines. But it could rankle some faculty, who decry having a game the week before final exams, and fans, who prefer the teams' annual grudge match to be an all-day affair on a Saturday.

Last week Oregon athletic director Pat Kilkenny asked OSU athletic director Bob De Carolis for permission to move the game, which is in Eugene, to Thurs. Dec. 3. De Carolis expressed mixed feelings but noted that there was a financial incentive to move the game. The Beavers' Thursday night game against USC last season landed each school $300,000, he said.

Do you support moving the Civil War football game to a Thursday night? ( surveys)Oregon and Oregon State have resisted scheduling Thursday night games later in the season because of the disruption they can pose to academic schedules, and because fans have complained about late-night drives home. Some fans also have opposed moving the game from a Saturday, when they can spend hours near the stadium tailgating and, for one lucky group, celebrating victory.

But the schools' twin desires seem to have overruled those concerns: securing a TV-broadcast payment for the game, and merely securing a spot on TV. On Nov. 28, the day for which the original game was scheduled, the Civil War faced competition for air time with several other Pacific-10 Conference match-ups: Arizona at Arizona State, UCLA at USC and Washington State at Washington.